“Where did you run into him?”
“I went up to Grief Cottage to take some photos for you. He was there, and we went on a tour inside the house. He called it our cottage crawl.”
“You went inside?”
“Yeah, the upstairs is pretty bad. I pretty near fell through a stair when we were going up.”
“Marcus!”
“No, it was fine. He was right there to grab me. I took two rolls for you on those disposable cameras. I can pick up the prints tomorrow. You’ll have them when you go back to painting your best sellers.”
“If I ever regain my full range of motion.”
She must have been on the laptop again, trawling for dire wrist stories.
“You will.”
She met my optimism with a sour look. “But here you are, just in time to peel my banana and uncork a bottle of wine. Oh, my bed linens are already in the washing machine—they can wait until there’s a full load. I’ve already put fresh sheets on.”
“You managed alone?”
“One-armed people have to learn to make their beds.”
“How is your… private project coming?”
“I’m either onto something or deluding myself because I can’t do real work. A colonoscopy is when they insert a tiny camera into your rectum and send it up through your intestines to look for polyps—or worse things. I’ve had one. If you want, you can watch the procedure on a TV screen while they’re doing it.”
“Did you watch?”
“Naturally. I’m the visual type. It looked like the inside of a soft, pink tunnel, going up and up, with little craters and bumps along the way. No alarming bumps in my case. If you’ll uncork that bottle of wine for me, Marcus, I’ll be off to my obsession or delusion—or whatever it is.”
Walking next door to the “compromised” Upchurch house to get Roberta’s list for my ride to the island store, I debated whether those old brick footing columns would look better “uncompromised,” without the white latticework in front of them. But I decided the latticework made the house look more solid and neat.
“No list today, Marcus. We’re going to Myrtle Beach this afternoon to get her hair and nails done, so I’ll do my shopping at the Piggly Wiggly,” Roberta said.
“Is there some special occasion?”
“Tomorrow is around the time Mr. Billy arrives.”
“But—how—?”
“How we going to handle it? Like the inchworm does.” Roberta made a spritely humping movement with the back of her hand. “One inch at a time. She’s no fool, she’s just taking it slow. She knows he’s not coming, but she wants to reverence the occasion in her own way. She hopes you’ll be visiting tomorrow at the usual time.”
“But, how should I act?”
“The way you always act. She’ll do the rest.”
Biking to the island market, I racked my brain for tempting meals I might make for Aunt Charlotte. As I considered the options within my range, I was aware that the real problem hovered above me like a sneering gremlin, biding his time for a pounce.
Aunt Charlotte didn’t care about eating. Since I had come to live with her, neither did I. We had more interesting matters to attend to. That weird unlit morning when the ghost-boy had showed himself to me in the doorway of Grief Cottage, I had breakfasted on a fistful of dry cereal before I hurried north on the spellbound beach.
Mom and I had enjoyed our meals. Supper was usually our only one together, and though she was worn out from work, that was our time for conversation: conversation meaning the kind of talk when people tell their day, complain, and make plans for the future. Aunt Charlotte and I didn’t really have conversations. Our exchanges were more like brief Q & A’s (“Where did you run into him?” “How’s your project coming?”), or requests for things (mostly her requests since her accident—like haircuts and peeling bananas and opening bottles…).
“At last!” shrieked the gremlin, nose-diving through space to sink his claws into my back. “You finally said bottle!”
Eight cases were delivered to our door at intervals. I carried them in, made a stack in the pantry, and unpacked each case as the necessity arose. Ninety-six bottles allows you three a day for thirty-two days. If you ran out before then, you ordered the next eight cases. There were never more than eight cases, but since I had arrived in mid-May, the deliveries had become more frequent. She ordered mostly Bordeauxs and Burgundies and always chatted, more than usual for Aunt Charlotte, with whoever was on the other end of the line at the Myrtle Beach wine store. She could make it sound like she was having regular guests, who knew the difference between Bordeauxs and Burgundies and why, if you did order Beaujolais, it had to be from a good year.
I had been telling myself that when she got her casts removed she’d taper off. But, now that I thought about it further, she’d always had an open bottle in reach. She always drank when she was painting, which was almost all the days I had lived with her. The only time she had stopped cold had been for a few days after the second surgery when she was afraid to mix painkillers with alcohol. So, what was the problem? She had been doing this for years and turning out paintings and enjoying her solitary life. Why should she stop now?
Maybe it was just my problem. It was all about me. I was afraid if she started drinking more bottles a day, stumbling and falling on a regular basis, maybe really damaging herself, she would be declared an unfit guardian and back I would go into the system.
Yet I shrank from the thought of confronting her: “Aunt Charlotte, do you think maybe you ought to slow down a little with the wine?” I knew her sour look, which I had received as recently as today. “Marcus, just open it,” she would say. And I would open it. She could also kick me out of her house for being a pain. (“He was a nice boy, but he became judgmental. Like Lachicotte. My life was no longer my own.”)
The “monthly stipend” would of course be taken from her, but she had lived without it all these years, and there would be family court and lawyers and maybe the court would appoint a trustee to manage the funds—I didn’t know all the legal details, and also I was in another state now where they had their own rules. I would be sent to another house, not a relative’s since there were no more relatives—or, if there weren’t any vacancies, an institution.
I stopped here. I would have to trust the fates that she would avoid another disaster between now and getting her casts off. Maybe she’d finish her secret project and go back to taking orders for her paintings. What power did I have to change an old and comfortable habit? I wondered what Lachicotte had said in former days when he “nagged” her…
“Congratulations,” mocked the gremlin straddling my back. “You’re not the brightest bulb in the drawer, but you finally saw the light.”